The street had already begun clearing out the moment Menthuthuyoupi dropped his concealment. Netero plummeting from the sky and cratering into the asphalt only accelerated the exodus. The pedestrians who had hesitated finally broke into a sprint. Those already running dug their heels in harder. A sparse handful of bystanders, belonging to that specific subset of humanity more inclined to record a disaster than flee it, lingered at the perimeter, their phone cameras trained on the settling dust cloud.
"Is that Netero?"
"That's Isaac Netero. That's literally the Hunter Association President."
"Why is he fighting a monster in the middle of a commercial district on a Tuesday?"
Perched on the distant parapet, Neferpitou crouched in total stillness. She took in the scene below—the President casually stepping out of the shattered pavement, the newly arrived long-haired Hunter, and the white-haired boy clutching his sister.
All of this looked very promising.
Kite stepped into position beside Netero, offering no preamble. "I'll help."
Netero didn't refuse. His singular objective for the day had already soared off toward the horizon on a construct of hard light. What remained was a Royal Guard—not his intended target, but a highly dangerous obstacle actively occupying the space directly in front of him.
Killua held his ground. He analyzed the old man standing just feet away. The resulting data sent a sharp jolt through his nervous system.
He had spent his entire childhood confined within the Zoldyck estate. He had been subjected to the suffocating pressure of his grandfather Zeno's aura on a regular basis. It was a terrifying presence, but it had calibrated Killua's internal gauge for assessing genuine threats. This, however, was fundamentally different. The sheer density of Netero's aura pressed against Killua's skin, a heavy, silent command that urged every instinct in his body to find a reason—any reason—to be somewhere else.
Netero cast a brief, sideways glance in Killua's direction. Having categorized the boy as a non-threat, the old man returned his focus entirely to the rooftop.
Killua felt his spine snap rigidly straight under the weight of that single look. He actively decided not to analyze the reaction.
"Move away from here," Netero barked at the lingering spectators. His tone carried the heavy, unmistakable cadence of a man entirely accustomed to absolute obedience. The phones vanished. The stragglers scattered.
Netero mentally tallied the field. One guard accounted for, actively engaging him. Specialization type, based on Kite's observation. Her physical capabilities clearly pushed the Guanyin's operational limits into uncomfortable territory. The second guard had chased the Ant King. The third remained unaccounted for, likely observing from a hidden vantage point.
He brought his palms together.
Neferpitou launched herself off the parapet.
She dove point-first, her hands pressed tightly together, channeling her entire momentum into a single, lethal vector aimed directly at Netero's right arm. She had mapped the trajectory mid-air.
The 100-Type Guanyin was already in motion. Not as a conscious reaction to her dive—she was moving far too fast for conscious thought. The golden arms swung as an automatic response, birthed from decades of drilling the rhythm of threat and counter-strike so deeply into Netero's muscle memory that his brain had entirely bypassed the decision-making process.
An enormous golden palm slammed into the apex of her dive, violently redirecting her downward momentum sideways. She smashed into the adjacent pavement, instantly rolling back onto her feet.
Kite stood nearby, her hair blown completely horizontal from the displaced air. She blinked, her brain struggling to process the visual data that had just outpaced her optical tracking.
"Didn't see that," she murmured under her breath.
Neferpitou dusted her hands off against her thighs. Her lips curled upward. This opponent warranted her full, undivided attention.
She shifted her gaze toward Kite. The Hunter still gripped the javelin.
Crazy Slots number eight. A javelin. Kite's least favorable draw. The restriction was absolute: the weapon could not vanish until it struck a target. She adjusted her grip on the shaft, rapidly calculating how to effectively employ a melee weapon in an engagement currently moving faster than her eyes could follow.
Neferpitou closed the gap between them, erasing the distance in a fraction of a second.
Kite snapped the javelin up purely out of instinct, forced by the weapon's binding condition. Neferpitou's claws smashed into the reinforced shaft. The sheer kinetic force of the impact launched Kite into a violent, spinning trajectory backward before her boots finally slammed against the pavement, digging deep gouges into the asphalt as she arrested her momentum.
High above, the Bodhisattva's next massive palm descended.
Neferpitou didn't dodge. She didn't need to. In the microsecond before the golden hand connected, a dark, violet phantom materialized above her. The monstrous puppeteer loomed, thick silken threads dropping from its immaterial fingers to latch onto every joint in Neferpitou's body. The strings snapped taut. Her muscles, bones, and tendons were instantly bypassed, her movements dictated by an entirely separate, flawless physical architecture.
Terpsichora.
The golden palm slammed into the street, cracking the asphalt violently.
Neferpitou was simply no longer there. The puppet strings had ripped her out of the impact zone, depositing her seamlessly in the adjacent space.
"President," Kite called out, holding her ground. "I need an opening. If the javelin connects, I can create a bounded space with her at the center. Parallel to reality, separate from it."
Netero reached into his jacket pocket. His fingers brushed against the small vial prepared by Gel and Cheadle—the vial intended for the Ant King. The King had refused the delivery. The old man weighed his options.
"Make it count," Netero ordered. The rhythm of his palms began again.
Kite shouted a single warning the moment Neferpitou vanished underground.
Killua's aura flared into crackling electricity before his brain processed the command. His nervous system operated on pure reflex, triggering the evasion tactics drilled into him through years of brutal family training. He pushed off the asphalt before the surface beneath him even began to crack.
Neferpitou burst upward through the pavement, her claws slicing through the exact coordinates Killua had occupied a millisecond prior. Her strike met only empty air.
Killua vaulted across the street, his boots catching the edge of a nearby building's eaves.
He didn't stop. The electricity coursing through his body overclocked his perception, slowing the world to a crawl. He bounded across rooflines, kicked off brick walls, and varied his trajectory with every point of contact, desperate to widen the gap. He was fast. He knew exactly how fast he was. Since Liam had forcefully opened his aura nodes two years ago, Killua had effortlessly outpaced every opponent he had faced.
Neferpitou caught him at the fourth roofline.
It wasn't a matter of raw speed. With Terpsichora engaged, standard physics no longer applied. The puppet strings bypassed her physical limitations, violently repositioning her mass and erasing the distance in a series of terrifying, halved intervals. Suddenly, there was no gap left.
She lunged for Alluka.
Killua felt the lethal intent shift toward his sister. His training screamed at him, forcing his body into a desperate, mid-air contortion. It wasn't fast enough. The deadly claws closed in.
Then, the world stopped.
The small child clinging to his back rotated her head.
It wasn't a natural movement. The neck twisted unnaturally, far past the limitations of human anatomy. The face that stared back at Neferpitou was not Alluka's.
The eyes were pitch black. The features were swallowed in shadow. The presence radiating from the child defied all established parameters of Nen. It operated on a frequency completely divorced from aura, power, or combat logic. It was a primal, suffocating dread—the kind of terror that made powerful beings instinctively understand they were outmatched by something entirely outside the concept of power.
Neferpitou's hand froze mid-strike.
Deep within her chest, a completely foreign sensation took root. It wasn't the familiar thrill of a worthy opponent. It wasn't the stimulating puzzle of a difficult fight. It was a cold, ancient command demanding she vacate the area immediately, a mandate that permitted no argument.
The rooftop was empty.
Killua and the entity on his back were gone. No aura displacement. No residual energy. Nothing.
Neferpitou stood alone on the concrete, her chest rising and falling as the chilling sensation finally ebbed.
A cold sweat beaded across her forehead.
The massive golden palm of the Guanyin swung toward her back. Terpsichora instantly engaged, violently jerking her body out of the trajectory, flowing around the strike like water splitting against a rock. She landed gracefully, fully intact. Netero's technique was flawless, raining blows from every conceivable angle. Terpsichora's repositioning capabilities were finally being pushed to their absolute limits.
She had enjoyed the engagement far more before she understood exactly what was clinging to the white-haired boy's back.
Killua opened his eyes.
The harsh neon glare of the city had vanished. Soft, amber sunlight filtered down through a canopy of thick leaves. The air smelled of damp earth and pine needles, entirely devoid of concrete dust and exhaust. A gentle breeze rolled across the tall grass.
He stared down at his hands. He was unhurt. He turned his head.
Nanika stood beside him, her dark eyes looking up at his face.
"Alluka," Nanika said quietly.
Killua understood immediately. The scheduled three-hour limit was still fourteen minutes away. Alluka, safely sequestered back at the Kukuroo Mountain estate on the other end of the Friendship Lasts Forever connection, had witnessed the attack on her brother. For the first time in her life, she had issued Nanika a direct command.
He had always assumed he was the only person who loved Nanika enough to issue commands without triggering the terrifying, catastrophic backlash. Nanika had confirmed it herself during that quiet afternoon in her playroom, admitting that Killua's love bypassed the rules entirely.
He had never stopped to consider the implications of Alluka's love. She shared the exact same body. She had been Nanika's closest, most intimate companion since long before either of them had the vocabulary to understand their existence.
Killua stood in the tall grass, letting the realization settle over him.
Alluka, who had spent her entire existence passively accepting the hand she was dealt, had finally broken her own rules. To save him.
He took a slow, deep breath.
Nanika turned away and walked toward the crest of the hill. She stopped at the edge, staring down into the dense tree line below. Killua stepped up beside her, following her gaze. He channeled aura into his eyes, straining to pierce the shadows of the forest.
"Is there something there?" he asked softly.
Nanika didn't answer. She simply raised a small hand and pointed.
Down in the shadows, where the late afternoon light struggled to penetrate the ancient canopy, Killua's enhanced vision caught a faint anomaly. It was a stillness that felt deliberate, a subtle condensation of natural energy pulled tight, like a man drawing a heavy coat around his shoulders against the cold.
Nanika saw it far more clearly. The ambient energy held a distinct shape. A human shape. The same shape that had walked into the Zoldyck estate years ago, stared down his terrifying family, and forced them to understand the truth about Killua and Nanika.
She didn't know how she recognized the signature. She just did.
Liam was down in the trees.